Questions about 4K online/offline workflow

To start, I apologise if this is in the wrong forum, but I am struggling to find an easy workflow for my friend's short film that I have agreed to edit.

We shot it on the Sony FS7 (4096x2160) and the Sony A7S Mkii (3840x2160) and recorded with a Zoom F4 kit. So as of now we have separate 4k footage (separated into 9 different rolls/cards) and audio files (separated by shoot days). I am using my university's Avid ISIS drive to perform online/offline editing but I feel like I'm doing it incorrectly. So I have a number of questions:

1) Do I set up my "offline" project as a 1080p project on my hard drive (where the 4k rushes are) or on the ISIS drive? (where I'm transcoding my 4k footage into 1080p footage) As of now I have the projects on the ISIS drive but I have a feeling that once I disconnect from the ISIS drive to come back "online" that I'm gonna lose access to the project, which defeats the point of the whole process. Am I okay to save the project on my hard drive, transcode to ISIS and edit that way?

2) Should I be using two different projects for this? One for online and one for offline? I have been told to link my 4k footage onto an "offline" 1080p project, then transcode it in that same project onto the ISIS drive and then when I have picture locked, I should start a new "online" 4K project, open up the Cuts bin and move my 1080p project sequence into my 4k project and relink the media. Is this the correct way of doing it?

3) Should I assign a "disk label" to every single individual linked clip, then transcode it (For example call scene 1, shot A take 1 "S1SAT1" then scene 1, shot a take 2 "S1SAT2" and so on...) OR should I just give a disk label to each collection of clips? (all the clips in roll one would be called "001", all the clips in roll two would be called "002" and so on...). I've been told that the disk label helps Avid to relink "offline" 1080p footage back to its original 4k footage, so that would suggest each clip would need an individual disk label, is that correct? Or will it be fine with just roll labels?

4) In regards to the audio, should I sync every audio file with its corresponding linked 4k footage THEN transcode to 1080p or should I only link it once it's transcoded? Would it cause issues if the original 4k footage isn't synced? Or does the relinking process not touch the audio anyway so it should only affect the 1080p footage and leave the video and audio synced up? I've been told two different things by my uni lecturers.

Any help on this topic would be insanely appreciated. I've been struggling to get a definitive answer on these as I've had so many contradicting takes on this topic.

Re: Questions about 4K online/offline workflow

drop me a message offline and I can help more as its a complex thing to post into a forum.

But as an outline:

Are you planning on making a 4K DCI output or an UHD output? (4096 wide or 3840 wide) As you will have to resolve the difference in aspect between those sources.

But for the offline I'd connect the backup source drives (you do have at least 3 copies of the sources not stored at the same location!) to your edit suite.

Create an HD 1080P project (on the ISIS if you have the capacity to do that and rights etc) AMA link from the source drive(s)

into bins the reflect the Source folders.

Then select all thsoe AMA clips in that bin and update the TapeID field to reflect the source folder name (as a backup)

Use the frame flex setting (applyable to all the clips in a bin if needed) to handle the aspect difference (So either making 3840 to 4096 by scaling and then cropping top and bottom or cropping the sides of the 4096 to 3840. If you are outputting 3840 ultimately then a 1080 offline works perfectly as that 16:9. But if you are doing a 4096 4K output thats not 16:9 so your offline 1080 project will need to be letterboxed)

Then transcode to the DNx offline codec you want to use. This transcoded media will go direct to the ISIS.

When all done disconnect the source drives and you should ahve an ISIS Project connected to low res Proxy Avis media on the ISIS to do the offline edit.

You can then create a sync map and make Group clips of any multicam content or to tie Video and audio into clips.

Re: Questions about 4K online/offline workflow

drop me a message offline and I can help more as its a complex thing to post into a forum.

But as an outline:

Are you planning on making a 4K DCI output or an UHD output? (4096 wide or 3840 wide) As you will have to resolve the difference in aspect between those sources.

But for the offline I'd connect the backup source drives (you do have at least 3 copies of the sources not stored at the same location!) to your edit suite.

Create an HD 1080P project (on the ISIS if you have the capacity to do that and rights etc) AMA link from the source drive(s)

into bins the reflect the Source folders.

Then select all thsoe AMA clips in that bin and update the TapeID field to reflect the source folder name (as a backup)

Use the frame flex setting (applyable to all the clips in a bin if needed) to handle the aspect difference (So either making 3840 to 4096 by scaling and then cropping top and bottom or cropping the sides of the 4096 to 3840. If you are outputting 3840 ultimately then a 1080 offline works perfectly as that 16:9. But if you are doing a 4096 4K output thats not 16:9 so your offline 1080 project will need to be letterboxed)

Then transcode to the DNx offline codec you want to use. This transcoded media will go direct to the ISIS.

When all done disconnect the source drives and you should ahve an ISIS Project connected to low res Proxy Avis media on the ISIS to do the offline edit.

You can then create a sync map and make Group clips of any multicam content or to tie Video and audio into clips.